Therefore,
B2B enterprises must start paying more attention to online customer
experience and to your respective digital storefronts within retail
channels—eCommerce sites, marketplaces, printed catalogs, social
media—that are displaying your product information. As the holiday
season approaches, ensuring that you are providing the best customer
experience possible may mean the difference between a stellar and a
lackluster season.

To meet this increasing demand for product
information, companies often turn to technology solutions to facilitate
the process of getting information published in a variety of sales
channels—a process often referred to as syndication. Syndication ensures
that product content is exported in the right format, to the right
place, at the right time, and in an automated fashion.

The Syndication Challenge
To
bring their products to market, many manufacturers leverage the
opportunities inherent in Big Box channels and retailers, such as
Amazon, Google, Walmart, Target, Home Depot and the like.
However, syndicating to these channels may present several challenges:

Information requirements differ among retailers.
Each retailer typically requires a unique data input format, such as
CSV, Excel, XML, or a proprietary format. For example, Home Depot
requires 189 columns for describing grass fertilizers, whereas other
home improvement retailers require a different data set. Just developing
these data sets for different retailers is often time-consuming and
cumbersome work for the marketing department.

Images frequently need to be delivered in different sizes, formats, and file naming conventions to different retailers. Not
complying with these rules and providing the required unique and rich
texts (descriptions, USPs, etc.) can lead to being “fined” by the
retailers. If this happens, you will most likely not show up in searches
and miss out on the opportunity of being in the spotlight on these Big
Box marketplaces.

The process is often manual. Marketing
teams are often required to upload product documentation to a supplier
portal, using FTP or similar protocols. Some manufacturers also have the
need to syndicate to GDSN/GS1 as well as to the retailers, which adds
to the complexity.

Lack of consistency in the presentation of product information.
When each retailer has unique information requirements, it follows that
product displays are also unique. In addition, each retailer may have a
distinctive process for handling the product information, which can
result in inaccuracies and inconsistencies from channel to channel. This
can reduce trust among consumers, since they are not sure which version
of the product data to believe.

For many manufacturers it
is simply not an option to forego a presence on these marketplaces.
According to BloomReach’s State of Amazon 2016 report, 55% of US
consumers began their shopping search on Amazon in 2016, a 44% increase
over the prior year. In addition, consumers are still frequenting other
online “Big Box” and department stores, such as Kohl’s, Macy’s, Best
Buy, and Bed, Bath and Beyond, where product information accuracy and
consistency is imperative.

Where customers start their product search (Source: State of Amazon 2016, BloomReach)

What does this mean for you?
If
you don’t have a robust and state-of-the-art product information
management process in place before syndicating, you may lack the ability
to publish consistent and helpful product information that really makes
a difference. And it needs to be consistent—always. According to
Forrester Research, “Customers rely on comprehensive, accurate data to
help guide their purchasing decision…customers use this information to
decide whether they can trust the seller and if the product will meet
their needs.”